~ Feminism is for everyone!

Tag Archives: Activism

Happy New Year everyone! I love this time of year because despite the fact that many beginnings may end – that promise to go to the gym or give up sweets – some promises and ideals stick. I think there may be something magical, not so much with the first of the year, which in actuality is like any other day, but the idea of a beginning. A beginning is an adventure, an opportunity. So it gives me great pleasure to share with you a beginning that will hopefully touch each of us soon. This beginning is being initiated by this awesome lady who has decided to invoke on a physical and intellectual journey across America to ask a question that is near and dear to this blog: What is feminism? I love this, and other kinds of questions of this nature, because I can be sure that my answer may not match the person’s next to me, which gives the answer to a question like “what is feminism” depth and life and purpose.

So without further a due, I will let the words of this awesome lady speak for herself about her project.

(This post is part of a series. You can read the first post, in which I discuss passing privilege, here.)

Many of you probably have at least a general idea of what Impostor Syndrome is but if you don’t I encourage you to go read Bridie Marie’s piece which describes the phenomenon and gives a healthy dose of kick-ass encouragement to help overcome it. What I’d like to talk about here is not necessarily the same but is functionally similar enough in the anxiety it inspires.

Queer Impostor Syndrome

In the great scheme of things I’m still pretty new to the world of intersectional feminism. At the same time, and largely because of it, I’m also still understanding, processing, and actively creating my own identity. Since I’ve been exploring my identity and confronting privilege at the same time I’ve had to remain constantly vigilant that I’m not using privilege to assume a socially marginalized or oppressed identity to which I don’t have a right*. This is basic respect and something we should all maintain awareness about but over time that constant vigilance and empathy has also resulted in what I think of as a kind of “queer impostor syndrome”.

We talk a lot on this blog about dismantling systems of oppression, and about what we want to build to replace them. I see the welcoming of the new year as a time of intention setting, so this open thread is dedicated to sharing stories of those who are building something. Tell us the cool stories of work you or others are involved in to make the world better. Let’s all get inspired for 2014!

I’ll start with three:

1. Ambidancing: In lots of partner dancing, leading and following is tied pretty strongly, historically and currently, to gender roles. The people at Ambidancetrous think that sucks, and they’re working to build dance scenes where everyone has a real option to lead or follow. They tell us why single-role scenes are sexist, why the nod to ambi isn’t enough, how to change it as an instructor or a dance partner…and give us some past and present visual inspiration:

The following post is about my learning disability. This is my writing raw, before I send it out for comments / edits. I am leaving it this way to show me unfiltered and unashamed.

This July, I was diagnosed with Moderate ADHD at almost 23 years old. While every case of ADHD is different, my disability affects me in a way that makes simple things difficult, like, remembering things or giving my full attention to tasks after I’ve already spent an extended period of time on them. I’m impulsive, which can be endearing or enraging depending on the situation. I’m extremely hyper and, if I’m not physically active enough during my day, I become overwhelming anxious with the amount of energy that is trapped in me. The diagnosis was not a shock to me and I volunteered for testing because I wanted to understand myself better. I had struggled with assignments all through school. I would edit my own papers for hours but some how they would be marked up in red when I got them back. Teachers and professors praised me that I was intelligent but careless. I was also incredibly forgetful. I was losing my phone at least two to four times a day because I just couldn’t remember where it was. I would forget to text people back for days (probably because I couldn’t find my phone…). While these sound like petty, little things, they manifest into something larger when you start to believe that you arestupid or lazy or thoughtless or an airhead. You begin to think that, instead of you are just different, that you are worth less than someone without your disability. You internalize it and you believe it.

As someone who has had the enormous privilege of being out as bisexual and queer for the entirety of my adult life, I am spending today basking in gratitude for the support, acceptance and celebration I have received from all of my family and friends.

I am also wishing happiness, comfort and support to anyone who is struggling right now with whether or how or how much to come out to the people in their lives, with whatever aspect of their identities they feel they have to hide. It’s such a hard and lonely place to be.

It is in support of those who still have to hide that I am announcing and celebrating my sexuality on this National Coming Out Day. No-one who knows me will be shocked or surprised; I am not revealing any secrets. But I am increasing my visibility as a functional, happy, successful bisexual woman. I am increasing my visibility as a bisexual feminist activist, with a place in the LGBTQ community. And visibility – visibility is important.

How many bisexuals do you know? You know what? I bet you know more than you think! (Yes, even if you are yourself.) See, research shows that bisexuals make up a larger percentage of the total LGBT population than gays or lesbians! In June 2013, The Pew Research Center reported that bisexuals make up 40% of the total LGBT population, though they also found that many more women identified as bisexual than men–see graph at right.[1] And in 2010, a study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, found that among all American adults, 3.1% self-identified as bisexual, compared to 2.5% as gay/lesbian.[2] Yet bisexuals are surprisingly closeted! While over 70% of gay men and lesbians said they are out to most or all the important people in their life, only 28% of bisexuals are![3]

So why are bisexuals not visible? A lot of it has to do with biphobia, which drives people into the closet. Lucy took down a lot of these problematic myths, so I won’t repeat them all here. But I want to focus in particular on the problems we run into in the “performance” model we apply to sexual orientation. People are expected to “perform’ their sexual orientation by dating someone of the orientation they’re attracted to. And bisexuals by this model are assumed to need “one of each.” But this isn’t true!

The idea for SHARE Fair first came to me from two places. Emily, a friend of mine, hosted a wonderful birthday party where she asked each of us to bring something to teach her. It was beautiful to see that room full of friends-of-friends, learning everything from silly card tricks to astrophysics. Everyone was so eager to learn each new thing, so excited for their own turn to share their knowledge.

I was reminded of Thinking Day, a holiday celebrated by the Girl Scouts. Once a year in a school cafeteria, the older girls put together tables for the younger troops, with information and activities on an assigned topic. The joy and fun of putting together and presenting a table to each new wave of younger girls made a much bigger impression on me than being a passive participant had, and I’ve already written here about how empowering it was to realize the content had been created by girls just like me.

SHARE Fair is a Thinking Day for social justice, with the goal of capturing the spirit of joy from that birthday party. It is an activist skillshare devoted to fun and community-building. The Fair is coming up this weekend. I wrote this post to encourage you to attend and to reflect on what this adventure has meant to me. Regarding that first goal:

Last week I spoke to summer hires, a group of young teens, at a local nonprofit. It was the end of their six week jaunt with a youth AIDS organization, and my goal was to inspire them to stay involved in activism after they left the program.

But activism can look like a lot of different things. If I was going to entreat them to be activists, I decided, I needed a working definition of what, exactly, that means. I boiled it down to three things: You are an activist if you pay attention to the world around you, imagine how it could be better, and do something about it. Continue reading →

Why are feminists so dismissive of it? After all, society contains harmful messages about men and masculinity. Why act like they don’t exist?

I thought about this for a minute before responding. I’m a major proponent of the well-worn feminist refrain, Sexism Hurts Men Too. I believe it; gender roles are restrictive and harmful for everyone.

But, I told him, there’s a difference between sexism and misogyny. Sexism may be a double-edged sword, but the sharper edge points toward women. Men (especially cis-men) are still unequivocally the winners of the gender-we-value award.

When we talk about misogyny, we’re not just talking about discrimination; we’re talking about hate. The kind of hate that’s systemic, strong, and pervasive. Misogyny is about the kind of hatred of women and of femininity that makes this world a dangerous place for women to navigate- both dangerous to our sense of self, to our souls, but also staggeringly physically dangerous.

This doesn’t happen.

The world just doesn’t have that kind of hate against men. That, I told him, is why so many feminists respond to claims of misandry with derision. The harmful effects of sexism on men are real, but misandry? Misandry is a joke.

Then I ran across this article on xoJane, about women who proudly claim to be misandrists, and what that means (summary as far as I can tell: misandry isn’t real; we use it to codify our radicalness and as a way of dealing with misogyny fatigue). I sent it out on our weekly reading-and-discussion email thread, and what you see below is the ensuing conversation. I would love to hear your thoughts on this- let’s continue the conversation in the comments!

If it isn’t readily apparent, we write a whole lot about oppression, sexism, and discrimination here at DDP. That talking involves a lot of reading, a lot of introspection and a fair amount of arguing.

The more you read and argue, the more likely you’ll find something you struggle to reconcile. For me, it’s the following line of thinking:

It is not my job to be your personal sexism, racism, homophobia, or oppression tutor.

The idea behind this is that it’s not the responsibility of an oppressed person to explain why a behavior, comment, idea, or action is offensive. Continue reading →